When Ronan was about five he
asked something like this: ‘If God is God and Jesus is God, does that mean
there are two gods?’ I answered, ‘one
day I am going to tell you something called the facts of life, but your mum is
responsible for explaining the doctrine of the Trinity.’ It takes a child’s question to remind us how
complicated the Trinity is!
The word I most commonly use when
trying to explain the Trinity is ‘mystery’, but one of the words I want you to
associate with the Trinity is ‘practical’.
I want you to see that the Trinity is the most practical idea in the
whole world.
One God in three persons
One God in three persons
We are not polytheists. We do not believe in three gods. We believe that there is only one true and
living God. This truth is expressed in
what is called the shema: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one’
(Deuteronomy 6:4). The Hebrew word
translated ‘one’ actually refers to a unity rather than simply to a
singularity. This word is used of a
bunch of grapes, and when Adam and Eve become one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Hints of this idea of Trinity are found in
the very first chapter of the Bible, when God says, ‘Let “us” make man in our
image’ (Genesis 1:26).
No-one denies that the Father is
God. After all the apostle Paul uses the
word ‘God’ as shorthand for the Father.
He writes about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (e.g. Romans
15:6, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Ephesians 1:3).
But there is a long history of denying that the Son is God. The Muslims claim that he is just a prophet
and the Jehovah Witnesses actually think that he is the archangel Michael.
There are five New Testament
texts that explicitly claim that Jesus is God (John 1:1, Romans 9:5, Titus
2:13, Hebrews 1:8 and 2 Peter 1:1), the most famous being in John’s prologue,
where he says, ‘in the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with
God and the Word is God.’ Unfortunately,
the Jehovah Witnesses will debate each of these texts. But there are a number of other ways to show
that Jesus is God.
Staying with John’s Gospel, you
could point them to Jesus’ use of the term ‘I am’. This goes back to the famous incident of the
burning bush, where Moses asks God who he should say has sent him to the
Israelites. God responds, ‘I am who I
am. This is what you are to say to the
Israelites, “I am has sent you”’ (Exodus 3:14).
To the Pharisees, Jesus declares ‘before Abraham was born, I am’. We can see that they knew what he was
claiming by the fact that they responded by picking up stones to kill him (John
8:58-59). At the climax of John’s
gospel, Thomas looks at the risen Jesus and proclaims, ‘My Lord and my God’
(John 20:28).
It is not just John’s gospel that
shows that Jesus is God the Son. We can
see it in all the gospels. In Mark, the
earliest gospel to be written, we see Jesus do things that only God does. So, when a man is lowered through a roof to
meet Jesus, Jesus tells him ‘your sins are forgiven.’ This leads the religious leaders to rightly
observe, ‘who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (Mark 2:7). Jesus calms a storm (Mark 4:39), and in the
Psalms God asked the rhetorical question, ‘who stilled the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves…?’ (Psalm 65:7). Jesus walks on water, and the careful reader
of the Old Testament might have recalled the following verse from Job: ‘he [God]
alone stretches out the heavens and treads the waves of the sea’ (Job 9:8).
One of the most fruitful ways to
show that Jesus is God is to look at the titles given to him. He is Immanuel, meaning ‘God with us’ (Isaiah
7:14). He will be called ‘mighty God’,
said the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 9:6).
Jesus said that he was the good shepherd (John 12:11), yet in Ezekiel it
is God who says, ‘I myself will tend my sheep and make them lie down’ (Ezekiel
34:15).
In the book of Revelation, the
Apostle John is given a wonderful vision while he is in exile on the island of
Patmos. Near the end of this, John gets
carried away and falls down to worship the angel who is speaking to him. The angel responds, ‘don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you with your
brothers and sisters who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God’ (19:10). We are only to worship God, yet in the same
book of Revelation we see Jesus being worshipped as the Lamb of God.
So, God is God the Son, but is
the Holy Spirit God. It actually follows
naturally that if the Son is God then the Spirit is too. The most famous text to show the existence of
the Trinity is when Jesus commission the disciples and tells them to baptise
people in the ‘name’ [singular] of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew
28:18).
Texts showing that the Holy
Spirit is God are less numerous than those demonstrating that the Son is. Two are often cited. The first comes from the incident with
Ananias and Sapphira, where Peter accuses them of lying to the Holy Spirit and
then immediately declares, ‘you have not lied to men but to God’ (Acts
5:3-4). The apostle Paul implies the
divinity of the Holy Spirit when he asks the Corinthians, ‘Don’t you know that
you yourselves are God’s temple and God’s Spirit lives in you?’ (1 Corinthians
3:16).
The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t
even believe that the Holy Spirit is a person, yet alone God. They think of the Holy Spirit as a kind of
impersonal force, like electricity.
However, the apostle Paul warns us not to grieve the Holy Spirit
(Ephesians 4:30). How can you grieve
something that has no personality of feelings?
If we see that Jesus is God the
Son, then the natural logic is to realise that the Spirit is God the Holy
Spirit. It has often been noted that
Jesus commissions his disciples to baptise people in the name [singular] of the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Before I attempt to show you that
the Trinity is the most practical doctrine in the world, I want to clear a
possible misunderstanding. There is a
heresy called ‘modalism’ which says that there is simply one God who consists
of one person who appears in various forms.
So, the Father becomes the Son who becomes the Spirit. We actually get close to teaching this when
we tell children that the Trinity is like water that appears in three
forms—water, ice of steam. The Trinity
is actually the mystery of one God yet three persons of Father, Son and
Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is
God and the Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the
Spirit. It really is a mystery.
The
Trinity is Practical
However, it is also the most
practical doctrine in the world. It
changes how we see God, how we see being rescued by God, how we pray and how we
live.
The Trinity means God is love. In Islam, Allah is one god consisting of one
person. How could Allah be love for all
of eternity past? Before he created
anything or anybody, who did he love. He
could only have spent all of eternity loving himself. But God is love (1 John 4:8). It is a part of his very nature. If there was no creation, he would still be
love. For all eternity past, the Father
has loved the Son and the Spirit, the Son has loved the Father and the Spirit,
and the Spirit has loved the Father and Son.
The Trinity means salvation is
wonderful. One theologian asks, ‘Why did
the Father send the Son? Because the
Father so enjoyed loving the Son that he wanted his love to be in others!’ God comes to broken, rebellious people and
invites us to join in the dance of delight.
God didn’t create humankind because he was lonely. He was not like the ancient gods who created
people to serve them. He created because
his loves overflows and he wanted to share it.
He wants us to enjoy the love he enjoys.
The Trinity should shape our
prayer. We can pray to the Son or the
Holy Spirit, but the most of all we should pray to the Father. Jesus showed us the pattern of prayer by
teaching us to say, ‘Our Father.’ But
how can we come to the Father confidently?
We come ‘in Christ’. Christ’s
death and resurrection means that we are washed and pure. We are received with the welcome that Christ
has one for us. We come in Jesus’
name. But the Holy Spirit is also
involved. He empowers our prayer. When we become to think that we might be
unwelcome at the throne of grace, the Spirit reminds us, ‘God is your Father,
who loves you and delights to listen to you.’
When we are apathetic in prayer, he makes us restless. When we don’t know what to pray for, he
guides us. He even takes our frustrated
groans and says to the Father, ‘if Paul knew you the way I know you, and Paul
understood the situation that way we can see it, this is what he ld say.’
Finally, as Christians we are
told to submit to the state, to our employers and to our church leaders. Children are told to obey their parents. Husbands are told to be servant leaders of
their wives. Wives are told to submit to
their husbands. We are commanded to
submit to one another in love. All this
submission is countercultural in our culture of self-assertion. Gentle, delighting, loving authority is such
a contrast to the common abuse of power.
But the Trinity magnifies the beauty of loving authority and glad
submission. The Son gladly submits to
the Father and the Spirit gladly submits to the Father and Son. When Jesus walked on the earth he allowed
himself to be led by the Spirit. There was
no manipulation or bullying, no self-assertion or resentment.
It is said that when Saint
Patrick came to Ireland he used the shamrock to teach about what the Trinity is
like. I don’t know if the shamrock is
a particularly good picture of the Trinity.
In truth I can’t think of any object that illustrates the Trinity
well. It is a mystery to us. But just because it is a mystery does not
mean that it isn’t the most God-honouring, glorious and life impacting truth
the world has ever been confronted with.
2 comments:
Paul, thank you for sharing your thoughts. This is an amazing and informative piece you have written, but such a help in sharing these truths with others. I guess you can't write in perfect French !!!! that would be wonderful for me, as most of the people I have conversations with about these spiritual things, do not speak English at all..... You may be interested to know that I now belong, as a member, to the Baptist church of Carcassonne. We meet every Sunday for worship and have an English Bible study every Wednesday morning for us English speakers. Our pastor is a wonderful Godly man who preaches and teaches just like you. He and his English wife have just had baby number 6 and indeed during the catatrophic floods we have just experienced, with 14 people killed, this young family had to move out of their house for several nights as there was a danger of a dam bursting above their village. I send my love to you and Caroline, and those wonderful children of yours. xxxxx Heather Gwynne
Re: the shamrock.. Whether St Patrick used the simile of the shamrock and the Holy Trinity or not, I think it is an admirable one. Why are you dismissive of it?
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